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VSMON takes up CPU - flash videos jerky!

Hello

I'm experiencing a real problem.

I've been a user of zonealarm for a long time, and currently have the ZA Antivirus edition.

If i watch youtube videos of very lowest resolution, they don't seem to be a problem. But if i watch videos of higher resolution it always starts going jerky, and the task manager tells me VSMON is taking up high cpu, around 50%.

If i watch videos of 360p it is jerky at first but then starts getting better.

If i watch videos of 720p it starts to be real hard to watch.

Videos of 1080p are impossible to watch, sound is find but picture goes maybe 1 frame per second.

If i shutdown zonealarm, everything works fine. The same problem is with another flash video website, it's not just youtube.

It is jerky only while the video is loading, and VSMON takes CPU while it loads the video. If i wait until the loading is finished, and start watching after that, there is no jerkiness! So it seems that VSMON "scans" the data somehow and makes the videos jerky. But i can't always wait for a whole video to load before i can start watching it, especially if it is a very long video.

I tried re-installing flash, firefox, Zonealarm itself etc. to no avail. Problem persists. I even used the appremover tool to uninstall the ZA.

I am having this same issue. Posted a thread about it, and it got closed very fast after getting suggestion to "use the Beta version to fix the problem".

I contacted official support and they told me to disable services not related to ZA, and it didn't help.

~SNIP~

I experience the problem most visibly by trying to watch high-res youtube videos, like 1080p. They are unwatchable, as vsmon chews up the cpu to 50%, and videos play 1 frame per 5 seconds. After shutting down ZAA, problem disappers, so i think it is causing it.

Re: VSMON takes up CPU - flash videos jerky!

Please go back to support and report it. There is no use reporting it back here, you need to keep following up with official support.
We simply cannot help you here as users.

Any other offtopic/repeated posts related to the issue will be removed without further notice. Please PM me in case you want to post information related to the resolution of the issue. This will help other users having your same issue.

Re: VSMON takes up CPU - flash videos jerky!

Playing video and depending how the video was compressed and what codex that was used and the other aspects of video puts a huge burden on the CPU. Especially HD video 720P and 1080P

The additional CPU cycles in VSMON are to be expected on some machines.

Mainly XP does a bad job of handling video if you want to do anything else but watch the video only.

Win 7 is better but CPU, memory and video card make a big difference on win 7 also.

Our Testing does not indicate ZA puts the burden on the PC its the video playback and the system itself and HD video content is a huge burden to the CPU and ZA. ZA has to look at all the data streamed and HD video is huge and will take more cpu cycles.

A good quad or more core CPU along with Win 7 and a new video card and up to date drivers will handle 1080P just fine from our testing.

There nothing that can be done or fixed in ZA to make it better. Its all about the HD video and system specs.